This invention relates to field maintenance operations for commercial aviation and military aviation and ground based equipment.
In recent years, field maintenance personnel are being asked to do more in less time. They are asked to be able to service many different aircraft types or different configurations of a single aircraft type. Often, seemingly very similar aircraft have maintenance details which differ quite significantly. The documentation needed to support the maintenance of a single aircraft is extensive and constantly changing. While it may be desirable to have all aircraft which had the same configurations at the time of first flight to be updated in lock step so that they remain nearly identical, this is not always possible or economically feasible. Field maintenance personnel do not necessarily know all the details of a particular aircraft's configuration until they are able to examine the systems and configurations in person.
Aviation maintenance is used herein as an example of one environment where the present invention provides much utility. However, it should be understood that the present invention is similarly beneficial in military land equipment (tanks, trucks, etc.) repair and maintenance, large construction equipment, off-shore oil rigs, manned space environments, just to name a few.
Typically, maintenance personnel need to first examine each avionics box to determine its precise configuration of hardware and software. After the equipment is fully identified, and its configuration and status is known, then the field maintenance personnel are able to gather all the documentation which is needed to move forward. This may mean going to the field maintenance library and assembling a large collection of paper documents and manuals, etc., which are wheeled out to the aircraft or electronically gathered and moved to the aircraft with one or more display devices. However, it has been known to have electronic maintenance data stored on the aircraft and made available to maintenance technicians. It also has been known in the industry to utilize cell phones with an additional RFID reader to interrogate and/or read RFID tags and provide information via the cell phone display device.
While these methods are well known in the art, they have the following drawbacks. 1) The increased trips back to get information increases the overall time needed to make almost any repair or maintenance operation. In some cases, the delay in just a few moments can cost lives. 2) The manual correlation of equipment configuration to maintenance documentation can introduce human error with wrong data used for calibrations etc. 3) The complexity of avionics systems is such that assistance may be desired of personnel not available at the maintenance location. Such remote assistance may improve efficiency by eliminating unnecessary equipment removals or repair actions after removal.
Consequently, there exists a need for improvement in field maintenance operation and information management which provides for context-specific access to documentation and to expert assistance for problem resolution.